Location: Outer Systems, Red Sand Archipelago – Colony World Nysa IX
The war hadn't come all at once.
It crept in like static across a long-distance signal—glitches in the feed, sudden blackouts, missing supply ships.
Then the burning started.
The UNSC Forward Command, Nysa IX
Major Ilana Voss, of the 3rd Marine Expeditionary Unit, stood over a fractured holotable inside the hastily fortified Cairn Outpost. The mountains behind them were now full of CLF guerrillas—well-equipped, agile, and increasingly bold.
"They're running Atlas tech. Adaptive coil guns. They've got mobility advantage across the canyon grid."
"We hold the supply corridor," her XO said.
"For now," she replied, tapping the map. "But if the next strike disables power to the orbital uplink tower, we're cut off. Permanently."
Above them, in low orbit, the UNSC Constant Resolution hung like a shield—but even she had taken a pounding last week from a surprise orbital drone barrage.
This wasn't a civil unrest operation anymore. It was war. Frontier-style. Dirty. Asymmetrical. Endless.
CLF Encampment, Deep Crater Ridge
Commander Thalen Rusk, once a Union administrator, now wore an old Atlas field coat over his new armor.
He stood with Wren—back from the "Silent Prism" op. Around them, teams trained, retrofitted scavenged gear, and uploaded encoded footage of UNSC aggression to be broadcast through hidden relay satellites.
"We hold their attention here," Rusk said. "But we need a win off-world. A colony they haven't locked down yet. Someplace symbolic."
"They'll hit us harder," Wren replied.
"Good. Then we bleed them in the open. Show the rest of the Outer Systems what resistance looks like."
Behind them, CLF engineers were wiring a Stinger-class railpod—half train, half missile—for a surprise strike on a nearby UNSC depot.
Across the Frontier – Dozens of Worlds, Dozens of Wars
This wasn't a clean war. There were no uniform lines. No treaties. Just sectors falling silent, one after another.
UNSC convoys ambushed in deep space by cloak-refitted Atlas hunter ships.
CLF cells torn apart by Helldiver squads after leaked intel stings.
Civilians caught between loyalty and survival.
Each side claimed legitimacy.
Each side buried their dead in the dust and told the living it was worth it.
Location: The Tantalus Reach – Outer Colony Belt
The stars above Kestrel's Divide burned cold and silent, but the void between them was anything but empty.
UNSC High Command had greenlit its largest coordinated operation since the outbreak of war: a multi-pronged planetary assault and orbital interdiction campaign. Its objective: to reclaim the Tantalus Reach—a critical cluster of mining worlds and shipyard stations that had fallen into CLF hands during the initial chaos.
The codename was simple. Brutal. Final.
Operation: Iron Mantle.
Stage One – Orbital Supremacy
From the bridge of the UNSC Vindicator, Rear Admiral Tomas Halvern watched as tens of UNSC warships emerged from slipspace. Battlecruisers, frigates, drone carriers, and escort craft formed up in silent precision.
Behind them, troop transports and supply haulers arrived in wave formations. They carried tens of thousands of Marines, ODSTs, Helldivers, and the newly activated Atlas-Frame mechanized regiments—experimental combat rigs designed for urban and exoplanet terrain.
"Engage jamming field. Ready mass-driver solutions," Halvern ordered.
"They'll know we're here in thirty seconds."
Across the starscape, CLF-controlled defense platforms began spooling up. Old Atlas-built turrets came online. Semi-autonomous drone swarms, dormant for months, launched like clouds of ash from the inner asteroid ring.
But the UNSC had prepared.
Drone-carrier ships like the Winter Pyre unleashed thousands of unmanned interceptors—outfitted with AI-driven threat algorithms and multi-vector engines.
It was less a dogfight and more a mathematical purge.
"Targeting feeds holding. No distortion," said Fleet AI Immanence.
"Orbital superiority projected in 5.4 minutes."
Stage Two – Planetfall
On the fractured surface of Nox Lyrae, the largest planet in the Tantalus cluster, drop pods screamed from the sky like meteorites. ODST fireteams punched through the atmosphere, landing amidst sonic booms and anti-air fire.
Sierra-One, led by Gunnery Sergeant Kai Myles, hit ground near an old Atlas refinery turned CLF command center. Dust storms painted the battlefield red. The ground shook with every movement of the deployed Atlas-Frame walkers.
"Move! Tag those shield nodes—we've got air support on standby!"
The CLF fought hard. They weren't amateurs—they were veterans of Atlas corporate wars, trained in asymmetric tactics, armed with captured gear and cloaking harnesses.
But they couldn't match the scale.
The UNSC didn't just send soldiers—they sent a doctrine: overwhelming force, superior logistics, orbital overwatch, and rapid resupply.
From city ruins to desert canyons, the UNSC began to dismantle the CLF's infrastructure piece by piece.
Stage Three – Shock and Collapse
Five days in, the CLF flagship Whisper Fang attempted to break the blockade. It didn't make it far.
Two Autumn-class destroyers and one Horizon-engineered kinetic array caught it in high orbit. It fractured into three flaming pieces over Nox Lyrae's second moon.
"Enemy flagship neutralized. Intercept chatter indicates chain-of-command collapse.
UNSC units began securing intelligence caches, capturing field commanders, and broadcasting calls for surrender.
But it wasn't a total rout.
Some CLF cells faded into the tunnels and wilderness, disappearing into fallback networks, waiting for their time again. Others chose self-destruction over capture—triggering reactors, booby-trapping data nodes, destroying their own bodies with micro-fusion grenades.
Operation Iron Mantle was a success—by military definition.
UNSC losses were "acceptable." CLF forces shattered across three systems. The Tantalus Reach was once again under UEG control.
Admiral Halvern stood on the bridge, watching the ash cloud of the last CLF stronghold drift across the lower orbit of Nox Lyrae.
"Mark it," he said, voice even.
"One front pacified. Eight more to go."
Location: Multiple Theaters — Outer Colonies and UNSC Deep-Route Installations
Date: Early 2201 — Three Months After Operation Iron Mantle
The Tantalus defeat hadn't broken the CLF. It had tempered them.
In hidden bunkers, scorched shipyards, and jungle moons untouched by UNSC recon, the CLF reorganized, rearmed, and reemerged with new tactics—driven not just by revenge, but by survival. What had once been scattered cells were now coordinated networks. Fed by black-market Atlas tech caches, fueled by generations of resentment, and emboldened by fanatics who saw martyrdom as strategy.
They called it Operation: Ember's Reign.
Not a battle.
A wave.
Phase One: The Spark Ignites
It began with silence.
A week of dead comms across five outposts along the Theta Trade Spine, a vital supply corridor for UNSC deep-space operations. The UNSC thought it was a relay issue.
Then the bodies started showing up.
Then the flames.
"Sir, Forward Station Cobalt is gone. No distress call. Just... slag. All crew presumed dead."
"What do you mean gone?"
"Orbital scans show total structural failure. Melted hulls. Precision sabotage."
CLF strike teams had infiltrated with stolen clearance keys. At each site, they planted plasma destabilizers and ion-core blasters. Not to steal. Not to occupy.
To destroy.
Phase Two: The Twin Moons Gambit
On the twin moons of Arcady Prime, the CLF launched their most audacious operation yet—a two-pronged offensive to seize UNSC R&D labs known to store early versions of captured nanosuit fragments and Horizon-subsidiary biotech.
Team Varlaine, composed of former Atlas infiltration specialists, breached the labs using silent grav-hooks and cloaked skiffs. Meanwhile, Liberation Force 8, heavily augmented with radicalized mech pilots, assaulted the surface garrison head-on to draw attention.
"Even if we die here," said Commander Ren Kael, voice cracked over open comms,
"the whole system will remember the cost of oppression."
By the time UNSC reinforcements arrived, the labs were ash.
And the data cores were gone.
Phase Three: Fire Across the Belt
In just four days, the CLF launched nine coordinated strikes across frontier space.
Asteroid refineries sabotaged
.Jump relays hijacked and used to misroute UNSC fleet deployments.
An orbital elevator on Midian V collapsed, killing thirty-seven thousand and cutting off all resupply to the southern belt.
A sleeper team on Mars set fire to a Horizon agricultural dome, triggering a temporary food panic.
In every broadcast, every hack, every graffiti-tagged wall, the CLF repeated the same phrase:
"We are fire. We are many. You are fuel."
The UNSC, stunned by the speed and scale, scrambled to respond.
Fleet elements were redeployed. Helldiver and ODST regiments pulled from garrison duties to chase phantoms. Civilian unrest spiked in colony sectors where the CLF appeared to strike with impunity.
ONI, meanwhile, began tracing the web—how they'd missed the buildup, the resupply lines, the encrypted message bursts hidden in trade manifests. Inside their black chambers, new doctrines were written. New lists were drafted. And more names were marked for removal.